At least 19 people have been killed and 10 workers are missing after heavy rain triggered floods and landslides across northern India and Nepal, with major rivers rising above danger levels.
In India’s Uttar Pradesh, state authorities said on Saturday that 15 people were killed and five injured over the preceding 48 hours, and 117 houses were damaged. Storms and heavy rain affected 63 districts. The state recorded 19 times its normal rainfall in the 24 hours to Saturday.
Nepal: a landslide and an avalanche
Four people — three children and a woman — died in Nepal when a landslide buried their house as they slept in Nishi Khola village, Baglung district, according to Krishna Prasad Acharya, the district’s senior-most bureaucrat.
Separately, 10 Nepali workers are missing after an avalanche buried the base camp of Himlung Himal, a 7,126-metre (23,379 ft) peak in the northern Manang district. Hiking officials said the workers had been pitching tents for foreign climbers, who were not at the camp when the avalanche struck.
Nepali authorities warned of possible flash floods in 49 of the country’s 77 districts, with more than half facing high flood or flash-flood risk as river levels continued to rise.
Shanti Mahat, a spokesperson for the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority, said Rasuwa and Nuwakot — the districts worst hit by last month’s floods, which killed more than 1,450 people and left thousands missing — should remain “alert” but are not currently rated high-risk.
Infrastructure damage
Flooding on the Rahuganga River damaged the structure and transmission-line towers of a 40-megawatt hydropower project, Water Resources and Energy Minister Biraj Bhakta Shrestha said. A technical team has been sent to assess the damage and restore the project.
Floods and landslides also cut telecommunications in parts of Nepal after damage to optical fibres and power supplies, Communications Minister Bikram Timilsinha said.
Rivers above danger levels in India
India’s Central Water Commission said 30 river-monitoring stations across seven states were in a “severe situation”, with water levels between the designated danger marks and previous record flood levels.
Several major rivers were above danger level at monitoring stations, including the Ganga, Gandak, Kosi, Bagmati and Narmada.
A note on sourcing
This account reaches Sri Lankan readers as an international wire report carried by Hiru News. The same report appears under an identical headline on other wire subscribers, indicating a single agency origin; the originating agency’s own page was not reachable from our systems for direct verification, so this article is published from the Hiru text alone. The figures above are the wire’s, as of Saturday.
This is a separate event from the August floods in Rasuwa and Nuwakot, which we covered as Nepal deployed drones for relief and when a Sri Lankan family was reported missing. The wire references that earlier disaster only to note that those districts are not currently high-risk.
